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Comment by gostsamo | Hacker News Reader

Surprisingly few people engage with the main points of the article. It is pointed out how much money are spent, but the article is about how profitable those fabs will be. The author is conservative in judgments, but they ask a few questions worth considering, mainly: are the fabs big and efficient enough to offset the slower build, which is also more expensive, for lower volumes of production.

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Profitability on the fab level is the wrong metric. Producing semiconductors, like producing vaccines, has large positive externalities. It enables basically the entire rest of the economy to function. These fabs could lose billions, kept alive by government subsidies, and still be a great deal for the country as a whole.

It’s hard to believe anything at the scale and complexity of a modern semiconductor fab industry could remain competitive without actually facing competitive market pressures.

I think this applies to manufacturing in general (it is good for a society to build things).

The trouble is that capturing government subsidies can become a business by itself.

As long as the subsidies are there to restart involvement I think you get the benefits without profitability. If real profitability isn't a medium-to-long-term goal, things could get messed up.

Macro economic arguments are pretty big here.

The real question is how unprofitable will it be to remain dependent on Taiwan in the face of the inevitable conflict coming with China. US and Europe based fabs could literally lose money and require subsidies and still net out as less expensive.

Competition is inevitable, conflict, no at least I hope not. Of course, we (the US) can’t make them decide not to attack Taiwan, but our countries have managed the tricky situation so far.

I wouldn't talk of a conflict with China as inevitable. Competition is fine but no one in their right mind should wish for military conflict with China, it would be a tragedy for humanity.

wish for and expect are two different things. I wish the war in Ukraine would end tomorrow, I don't expect it will though.

while China invading Taiwan is not a guarantee, it is certainly highly probable. this risk should be taken into account by the us government

Why do you think it’s highly probable?

Do you not keep track of current events?

Chinas activities in the South China Sea, the fact they openly say they will integrate Taiwan, by force if necessary and unemployment being 20-30% for young people are just a few red flags.

I think most of us only can reply to the first paragraph or so, and the first plot, because of the paywall. So most of the conversation is about the headline.

Below extension will be useful

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

I’d have to check and see how it works. I’m happy to block ads (I’ll render whatever I’m sent however I want), but I wouldn’t want to access content that the publisher didn’t intend to send.

It works for sites that set a cookie to limit how many free articles you can see without logging in, or sites that let search engine scrapers bypass the paywall to read the full content.

I would say it's a little more ethically questionable than ad blocking. Ad blocking is like buying a paper from a newsstand and duct taping over the ads - totally fine, it's my paper and I'll do whatever I want with it. This extension is like hanging around the newsstand reading all the front pages until the owner shoos you away, and then coming back with a fake mustache to keep reading.

Yeah, it feels vaguely more grey-area than ad blocking. Although that’s just a gut read, not very reliable.

I’m very much ideological about being in the camp: you can send me whatever you want, and I’ll render it however I want, and anyone who has a problem that is the problem.

I’m not sure how I feel about impersonating a scraper or switching around my cookies so that the site sends me something else.

Actually, this is legitimately the first question in this area that has gotten me confused in a while; if the tool was impersonating somebody, a specific person with account, that’s just be straightforwardly unauthorized access. Impersonating a category of user that has no actual specific identity, but that they default to allowing access? That seems… I mean, doesn’t really seem like lying exactly, but it also doesn’t seem totally honest. Tricky!

I think it's clearly dishonest, but fairly limited potential to harm the business. It's on the same moral level as going to a chain restaurant every week and telling them it's your birthday every time so they give you a free dessert. It's definitely lying but you're not going to put them out of business. If everyone started doing this, they'd just get rid of the free dessert/free article policy and probably be fine.

One thing that gives me a little pause is, these sites, they treat search engine scrapers preferably to humans, right? And the scraper’s job is to categorize sites and recommend them to people.

So, IMO, it is more like: if most restaurants gave reviewers preferential treatment and tended to comp their meals, and this was very well known, and you went around telling everybody you were a reviewer. Which also seems dishonest, but it isn’t like you are exploiting some nice little cute good-faith thing like free dessert on your birthday, you are exploiting the restaurant’s attempt to get a better review. Seems, like, dishonest but fair play.

And, I’d love if search engines would stop giving me paywalled sites, haha. So maybe it would be nice if everyone would exploit this loophole, they could close it, and the whole system would get a little more honest. (I’m not doing it unilaterally though).

there is an archive.is link posted in the comments and at least firefox has extensions for circumventing paywalls.

I think many people are just clicking on the main shared link, rather than using those tools.

For me personally—in general, I read the story that the author/publisher intentionally posted for public discussion. While it is possible to circumvent paywalls, I wouldn’t want to go against the will of the author and their publisher.

I think it is weird that we allow discussion of unauthorized copying of text here, but we don’t seem to allow (at least as far as I’ve seen) links for unauthorized copying of, say, movies or music.

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